The King Jesus Gospel
A theological exploration of the gospel message centered on Jesus as king and what it means to embrace his kingdom mission.
God chose one person, Abraham, and then through him one people, Israel, and then later the Church, to be God’s priests and rulers in this world on God’s behalf. What Adam was to do in the Garden — that is, to govern this world redemptively on God’s behalf — is the mission God gives to Israel. Like Adam, Israel failed, and so did its kings. So God sent his Son to do what Adam and Israel and the kings did not (and evidently could not) do and to rescue everyone from their sins and systemic evil and Satan (the adversary). Hence, the Son is the one who rules as Messiah and Lord.
My own preferred way to describe the comprehensiveness of the saving death of Jesus is to see that three things happened in that death: Jesus died (1) with us (identification), (2) instead of us (representation and substitution), and (3) for us (incorporation into the life of God).
I would encourage readers of the Gospels to read a passage or a chapter and then to pause and ponder long enough to permit their knowledge of Israel’s Story — the Old Testament Scriptures — to help them find connections between what the evangelists are saying and what the Old Testament told us. It’s everywhere, and without this story-to-story way of reading the Gospels, one simply doesn’t grasp what the evangelists were doing.
The difference can be narrowed to this single point: the gospeling of Acts, because it declares the saving significance of Jesus, Messiah and Lord, summons listeners to confess Jesus as Messiah and Lord, while our gospeling seeks to persuade sinners to admit their sin and find Jesus as the Savior.
the gospeling of the apostles in the book of Acts is bold declaration that leads to a summons while much of evangelism today is crafty persuasion.
The book of Acts does not have an atonement theory shaping the fundamental gospeling events of Peter or Paul. Some will be offended by this — in fact, I have myself been offended at times by their approach, but I ask us all to reread the New Testament.
Michael Bird puts this: “Nero did not throw Christians to the lions because they confessed that ‘Jesus is Lord of my heart.’ It was rather because they confessed that ‘Jesus is Lord of all,’ meaning that Jesus was Lord even over the realm Caesar claimed as his domain of absolute authority.”
Yes, the problem is our sin; yes, we need to be forgiven of sinfulness and our sins. But that sin and that forgiveness are connected to our lordly assignments and to our priestly responsibilities and to our flailing and failing attempts to usurp God’s tasks to make them ours. The only one worthy to sit on that throne is King Jesus.